Merry Christmas

With a Christmas tree. And again the problem with using that not very good scanner I have, this looks good enough as a small picture, and the original painting looks fairly decent, but if you enlarge this scanner image, well, some of the brush strokes can be seen in much sharper contrast than they seem to naked eye when you look at the actual painting, and the colors have changed a bit too, looking more murky in that image than they seem like in life.

Even though I am not a Christian I prefer ‘Merry Christmas’ to happy holidays or whatever. I am not a Christian because I believe in some things which are not part of the Christian doctrine, any version. For example reincarnation. And then there are some things which are part of most Christian doctrines which I don’t believe in (with the caveat that whatever I believe I acknowledge the fact that my beliefs are no guarantee of anything). In my early twenties I called myself Wiccan, now I guess just neopagan is more fitting. But while I can’t quite go with any of the Christian doctrines, not fully, I still respect Christianity, and I do have mostly Christian values since those are what I was brought up with. And the western civilization has mostly been build on those same Christian values. And I do think those of us who have been born here as the descendants of the people who build this civilization – or all variations of it – should honor them, and also Christianity, no matter what our personal beliefs happen to be. This is ours. It’s good to be polite towards those who live elsewhere, or have come here later and may have different values, but not to the point of forsaking what is our own. So western civilization is not perfect. So what? There is no such thing as perfect, not in this world, and what we have inherited is pretty damn good – we should be proud of it even when we do acknowledge the warts or blemishes we see. Remember that old saying about not throwing the baby out with the bathwater…

So, Merry Christmas, from a witch. 🙂